Saturday, February 4, 2012

The Corona Impeachment Trial: House to summon Midas on SC funds

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This post is not intended to violate copyright infringement law, this post originated from http://www.philstar.com

The House of Representatives will summon Supreme Court (SC) administrator Midas Marquez this week to explain the reported misuse of a $21.9-million loan from the World Bank (WB).
“All concerned (parties) will be invited. We will also extend invitations to officials of executive agencies with oversight functions over loans like the National Economic and Development Authority and the Department of Budget and Management,” Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone said.
Evardone authored a resolution seeking an inquiry into the findings of a WB review team on irregularities in the use of portions of the bank’s loan for judicial reforms.
Bayan Muna Reps. Teddy Casinno and Neri Colmenares have introduced a similar resolution.
The committee on good government, which Iloilo City Rep. Jerry TreƱas chairs, will conduct the inquiry.
According to Evardone, the WB review team questioned Corona’s appointment of Marquez as administrator, spokesman and head of the SC bids and awards committee.
Corona authorized Marquez to approve disbursements of up to P200,000, which was later increased to P500,000.
Evardone said the WB team considered Marquez’s multiple positions as anomalous.
He quoted the review team’s report: “This senior official, due to the combination of his appointments and functions, was the requestor of services, the approver of the terms of reference, the end-users of services (requested), the authorizer of contract extensions, and the authorizer of payments.”
The team pointed out that such a situation presented a conflict of interest and did away with internal checks and balances in disbursements and procurement of supplies.
“The team, after careful review, declares expenditures totaling $199,000 as ineligible, and requests the borrower (Supreme Court) to please arrange to refund, by Jan. 31, 2012, any un-refunded amounts,” the report said.
Out of the 133 disbursements reviewed from 2010 to 2011, 70 were ineligible expenses and constituted a “high proportion, which reinforces a key conclusion of this review: that there has been a breakdown in the internal control environment pertaining to the project.”
It also found out that 15 of the expenses not covered by the loan agreement “relate to the Office of the Court Administrator.”
Among the transactions reviewed were four contracts, whose cost ranged from P195,000 to P250,000, for “tri-media monitoring” awarded to Media Banc Monitoring Services, Inc.
The disallowed disbursements include airfare for local and foreign trips, allowances of the traveling officials, hotel food expenses, and payment of seminar speakers’ fees.
Because of these irregularities, Evardone said it is judicial reform that suffered.
For instance, he said the WB team discovered that the Regional Court Administration Office in Lapu-Lapu City in Cebu, which was chosen as a pilot project for reducing case backlogs, was not given the computer equipment it needed.
The project “is now being dismantled since the experiment did not realize the benefits it was expected to deliver. It is not clear what will happen to the equipment – the team was not informed of a plan for the alternate use of these assets,” he said, quoting the WB report.
It further noted that the computer equipment purchases were done “mostly through shopping procedures, mostly outside of the agreed procurement plan, mostly for units located in Manila, and through individual items/small lots, which militate against procurement economy and efficiency.”
“The apparent lack of standardization of technical specifications for commonly used IT (information technology) equipment (such as laptops) resulted in significant variations in price. For example, the documents reviewed indicate that unit prices for laptops procured ranged from $782 to $1,027 to $1,525 to $3,252,” the review team said.
The review team discovered that 36 percent of the value of procured IT equipment “was not for front-line judges and court personnel who need such equipment to expedite disposal of backlogs and cases, but for the Supreme Court in Manila.”
“This proportion rises to 62 percent if one considers that most appellate courts that benefit from the purchases are also located in Manila,” the report noted.


NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC:
This post is not intended to violate copyright infringement law, this post originated from http://www.philstar.com